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5.2. Inspecting the Hardware of Nodes

The director can run an introspection process on each node. This process causes each node to boot an introspection agent over PXE. This agent collects hardware data from the node and sends it back to the director. The director then stores this introspection data in the OpenStack Object Storage (swift) service running on the director. The director uses hardware information for various purposes such as profile tagging, benchmarking, and manual root disk assignment.

Note

You can also create policy files to automatically tag nodes into profiles immediately after introspection. For more information on creating policy files and including them in the introspection process, see Appendix C, Automatic Profile Tagging. Alternatively, you can manually tag nodes into profiles as per the instructions in Section 5.3, “Tagging Nodes into Profiles”.
Run the following command to inspect the hardware attributes of each node:
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap 
$ openstack baremetal introspection bulk start
Monitor the progress of the introspection using the following command in a separate terminal window:
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap 
$ sudo journalctl -l -u openstack-ironic-inspector -u openstack-ironic-inspector-dnsmasq -u openstack-ironic-conductor -f

Important

Make sure this process runs to completion. This process usually takes 15 minutes for bare metal nodes.
Alternatively, perform a single introspection on each node individually. Set the node to maintenance mode, perform the introspection, then move the node out of maintenance mode:
Copy to Clipboard Toggle word wrap 
$ ironic node-set-maintenance [NODE UUID] true
$ openstack baremetal introspection start [NODE UUID]
$ ironic node-set-maintenance [NODE UUID] false
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